Master of 500 Hats

Saya showing signs...

... of early labor.  looks like Layla may be on her way soon.

altho Saya is not officially due until jan 15, we were expecting an early delivery so stay tuned.  i'll post more as we know what's happening.

in the meantime, blogging / email / work / frisbee will likely be taking a back seat as we get ready for a few days at Stanford Hospital. wish us luck :)

MON 1/8 UPDATE: for those who were wondering, no news yet... turns out "early labor" signs above were false alarm, so we're still waiting.  we did manage to get a lot of nesting preparation projects out of the way.  saya is about as big as she's ever been, so we're guessing sometime next few days...

A *very* special Xmas, brought to you by Justin Timberlake, SNL, & YouTube

This is effin' hilarious (listeners under 18, please mute the volume for your tender ears):

Commentary from the NY Times on how SNL & Lorne Michels did an innovative end-around on the FCC and television censorship, by bleeping the word 'dick' from the live broadcast (16 times), but leaving the 'director's cut' version on YouTube uncensored.  other comments here.

(my haven't we come a long way from NBC pulling the Chronic-(what?!?)-les of Narnia clip off YouTube only a year ago...)

Spock Networks closes $7M from Clearstone, Opus

Spock Networks, one of the startups i'm advising, just closed $7M from Clearstone and Opus Capital.  Congratulations to Jaideep, Jay, & team :)

Press release is here, other coverage on VentureBeat & elsewhere.  Spock is building the largest people search engine on the planet... some say, the largest in the Federation.

The service is currently running in private beta, however we'll probably start opening it up soon to vulcans, sexy romulans, & perhaps a few logical humans.  Signup to be notified for the open beta.

Happy holidays.  Live long & prosper.

Yahoo Security Certificate expired; link to Yahoo Bill Pay not working last 2 weeks

this is annoying.  i've been a paying user of Yahoo Bill Pay for many years.  i'm pretty sure they're private labeling the CheckFree service, so i'm not sure who i should bitch at, but the application stability is terrible... they have downtime on a regular (monthly if not weekly) basis.  when it does work, the UI sucks something fierce. 

now the link to Yahoo Bill Pay in My Yahoo hasn't been working for over 2 weeks.  (update: looks like there's a hack / workaround to login to Yahoo Finance first, then scroll down and find the Bill Pay link and continue from there.  gee, that only took me about two weeks of attempts and a half-hour of search around on Yahoo's site... eventually found the answer by googling to Yahoo answers.  comic.)

not sure if it's related, but looks like Yahoo's security certificate for global.secure.yahoo.com expired on december 12th.  well, that's reassuring.

yo Ms. Decker, want to ask someone to get on that?  or is Dan Rosenzweig still on Ops until midnight 12/31?  hmm.

update2: friend of mine over at Yahoo said he pinged internal escalation to get this cleaned up.  one thing i will note is if you look around you can usually locate a few people at YHOO, GOOG, & MSFT who have their shit together and care enough to straighten things out.  thanks ian :)

the worst part about it is this is a service i PAY FOR, when there are free alternatives out there.  i know, i'm an idiot for not switching sooner... but once i have it all setup the way i'd like, i'd prefer not to switch.  however, this is definitely motivating me to consider other alternatives...

as a matter of fact, the whole financial / payments online space seems ripe for some Web 2.0 innovation.  watch this space.

Blog Tag + 5 things U didn't know about Dave

a game!  my kingdom for a game!

well, looks like todd 'oilman' friesen just included me in a game of blog tag :)

the basic idea of this game is to tell people 5 things about yourself that they didn't likely know, then tag 5 other people (or in this case, 5 bloggers) and see how far the meme progresses.

5 Things U Didn't Know About the Master of 500 Hats

1. i had a terrific crush on my 1st grade teacher, and wrote her a letter almost every day at lunchtime.  apparently my steadfast puppy love paid off: more than thirty years & thousands of kids later, i went back home to speak at her retirement party... where she maintained i had always been her favorite student.  i swear, there were witnesses.
2. when i was ten, i won a donut-eating contest held in my hometown (i'm king of the world!).  however while attempting to defend my title the following year, i threw up onstage in front of family & friends, and lost horribly to the smug, pudgy-cheeked mountain of a boy sitting next to me.  i cried like a baby.  it was devastating.
3. altho i was 'gifted' (translation: geek) i never graduated from high school.  in college, i was placed on academic probation a few times.  one semester i managed to "hit for the cycle": i got one A, one B, one C, one D, & one F.  i got the F for (among other things) sleeping thru a final exam.  the A was actually an A+ in Pascal, a programming class which i enjoyed tremendously.  in fact, i felt so confident about my programming skillz i took the final exam completely stoned... and aced it.  after getting my shit somewhat together, i did manage to make the dean's list before i graduated from JHU.  whew.
   
4. once on a dare, i tried to get several hundred people to get up & start dancing at a Neville Brothers concert in Vegas (my wife Saya was playing backup keyboards with them at the time).  after failing miserably to get someone to join me, i said WTF and decided to dance all by myself at the front of the stage.  security almost tried to remove me, however the crowd cheered me on, and by the end of the song they gave both me & the Nevilles a standing ovation.  To this day, the Neville Brothers refer to me as Dancin' Dave McClure. 
5. a few weeks ago in San Francisco City Hall, i was able to get ~500 people to do the "wave"... three times, no less.  completely spontaneous and unrehearsed.  i swear, there were witnesses.

okay, now i'm tagging 5 other bloggers:

• Shripriya Mahesh
• Ian Kennedy
• Mark Fletcher
• Noah Kagan
• Josh Kopelman

you're it.  now tell us your story!

500 Blessings to Chris & Ponzi :)

  Chris & Ponzi 
  Originally uploaded by dmc500hats.

So we only spent 6 hours on the ground in Seattle, but it was well worth the trip... Saya & Dante & i had a great time at the Pirillo-Indharasophang wedding this wknd :)

Ponzi was ravishing, and Chris was quite handsome for a LockerGnome (tho Robert & Maryam came in a close second, not to mention Matt & Glenda too). 

Our dinner table had its own full complement of SF Bay Area ubergeeks, bloggers, & photographers, with a dash of Channel Wine thrown in for good measure.  We had to run to catch our plane so we missed the par-tay on the dance floor, but sure looks like they tore it up.  What a great celebration...

Since this is actually my 500th blog entry (500 Blogs!) i was planning to save up and post something really special... however, i can't think of anything more special to say in words than what Chris & Ponzi's wedding says in pictures.

Our best & fondest wishes to the happy couple... may you live long, laugh loudly, and deliver lots & lots of little locker gnomes :)

[my pix here] tag: pirillo.wedding